Behind the Scenes

We thought you'd give you a peek behind the scenes and let those who are interested in how we develop good quality websites at a low cost into our secrets. We primarily use open source software and technology, which keeps our overheads and developments costs to a minimum. Although the process of creating unique websites is a complexed one, we strive for an end result of the simplest and clearest websites both for your visitors to navigate and for you to control and edit.

Open-source web technology

Joomla! Content Management Sytem (CMS)

"Joomla is the most popular open source CMS currently available as evidenced by a vibrant and growing community of friendly users and talented developers. Joomla's roots go back to 2000 and, with over 200,000 community users and contributors, the future looks bright for the award-winning Joomla Project." (from the Joomla! website). Joomla! forms the backbone of our websites but the fantastic thing is that we have been able to modify and develop this CMS and a multitude of add-ons to suite our clients needs and make it even easier to use. Jen, founder of Aye-aye Design is also a senior developer at New York based Joomla! component developer Dioscouri Design.

Piwik Open Source Web Analytics

We love Piwik, it is the leading open source web analytics software. Unlike remote-hosted services (such as Google Analytics), we host Piwik on our own server, which gives us full control over the data, for free. Piwik aims (and succeeds with style) to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. All the program's features are built as plugins, which means we can add new plugins built by the community and customize our Piwik installation to suit our clients needs.

Efficient development workflow

Eclipse

Eclipse is the software we use for our coding development work. "Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects and helps cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services." (from the Eclipse website). Because Eclipse is free and open-source, it's another thing that keeps our overheads, and therefore the cost of our websites, low.

Springloops

We manage our website code using the excellent online version control and collaborative web development studio Springloops. Springloops helps us to keep track of coding work we've done, reminds us as to what we have to do, provides an extra backup of all our websites and provides rapid deployment to the live website as soon as we've finished a peice of coding.

Together, Eclipse and Springloops give us the power to efficiently manage our growing portfolio of websites. They allows us to make important upgrades and add new features to our websites across the board, and the ability to quickly sycronise work on our development servers onto our live websites easily, meaning no downtime and space for extensive experimentation and testing of new features.